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Chapter 3 considers Forest’s internet-based art from the mid-1990s through the present, with particular emphasis on ritualistic and festive manifestations of public liminality that take place online or make the internet an integral part of the event, and on more whimsical exercises in parody and the détournement of interfaces reminiscent of his early experiments with print and broadcast media. Works discussed in Chapter 3 includeFrom Casablanca to Locarno: Love Updated by the Internet and Electronic Media (1995),Time-Out (1998), The Techno-Wedding (1999), The Center of the World (1999), Territorial Outings (2001), Meat: The Territory of the Body and the Networked Body (2002), Memory Pictures (2005), The Experimental Research Center of the Territory (2008), The Traders’ Ball (2010), Ego Cyberstar and the Problem of Identity (2010), Ebb and Flow: The Internet Cave (2011), and Sociological Walk with Google Glass (2014). Chapter 3 also explains Forest’s unique position in the acrimonious “Quarrel of Contemporary Art” (Querelle de l’art contemporain) that raged among French intellectuals and in the media in the 1990s and early 2000s and highlights his contributions to France’s annual Internet Festival, which he helped create.

In the early Internet, art history crossed the path of media history and both disciplines conveyed characteristics of each other. Net (based) art did not regain the utopian potential of art, but its social, aesthetic and conceptual approach referenced the future role of digital communication. This chapter documents and examines the role of the art network THE THING in early digital communication and art practice and how it anticipated the future potential to communicate, distribute, and produce. Including the theory and practice that informed the founding of THE THING, as well as an interview with THE THING founder, Wolfgang Staehle, and a concluding timeline of THE THING's history, this chapter also emphasizes how THE THING was both playful and far ahead of its time.

This paper discusses five exhibitions curated by the author of what might be most broadly termed network-based art: Beyond Interface: net art and art on the net (1998), Art Entertainment Network (2000), Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2001), Open_Source_Art_Hack (2002), and Translocations (2003). While they took place after the invention of the http protocol, they represent an inflection point prior to the commodification of the technology of social media culture and explore formative practices by artists and institutions for current recensions of social media.

This chapter looks at the new information machines increasingly running our lives and addresses the question of coding within recent software art. It argues that the invisible and viral nature of code exemplifies the new aesthetic paradigm where a politics of practice can only operate through experimentation geared towards the unexpected, the imperceptible. The chapter attempts to contextualise some Deleuzian notions in the practices and projects of software and net art through thinking code not only as the stratification of reality and of its molecular tendencies, but as an ethological experimentation with the order-words that execute and command.

This chapter explores voice and media art within computer networks, with an emphasis on voice and the emergent condition of the networked body in net art, wireless art, and spaces between online and offline networks, or cybrid spaces. It begins with the mechanical voice, as dramatized in films in which computers acquire emotions and a will of their own. The chapter then considers art works that no longer humanize the computer voice and instead highlight how it can emanate from anything such as a room or a book, and yet strongly influence our lives. In this way it offers a vivid perspective on the “hybridization of man and machine” that, although a departure from the traditional scenario, remains powerful. The chapter also analyzes the epistemological implications of the human–machine relationship, mediated by voice command.